Yonder Radio, or Something Worth the Quiet

There is a moment about twenty minutes into a good potluck when the noise level drops just a little. Not silent. Just easier. Somebody's had seconds, somebody's found a seat, the dessert table has been properly assessed. That's the moment when the conversation you actually came for starts. I thought about that moment when I sat down with Yonder Radio last week.

Yonder Radio is a new weekly hour, built for public stations that took the bad end of Congress's billion-dollar cut to public media a while back. Rural broadcasters especially. For anyone who hasn't lived somewhere with three FM options and one of them reads the livestock report, "rural broadcaster" used to mean the person who knew school was cancelled before the superintendent did. These days some of those stations are running on fumes and a part-time volunteer named someone's nephew. Yonder Radio is built to give them something to put on the air. Something real.

This week's show opens with Julia Tilton on New England fall foliage. Which sounds like a nice little nature piece until you realize there's a real economy tied to leaf season, motels and restaurants and whole counties that run lean all year and make up the gap in October. Tilton doesn't skip past that. She stays with it, and it's worth staying with.

Then Sarah Melotte takes up Flock cameras, those automated license plate readers starting to appear on back roads and county highways. The pushback from small towns is the part that caught me. People who can already tell their neighbor's truck by the sound of the exhaust don't need a database to know who came through at two in the morning. Installing surveillance where the social network already handles the job strikes a lot of folks as redundant at best, and a little insulting at worst.

Which reminds me of the time the county wanted a traffic camera at the intersection by the grain elevator. Big Earl organized a petition, not over privacy, just practicality. "I already know who runs that stop sign," he said. "It's the same three people, and two of them are cousins of mine." Camera went up anyway. The three people kept running the stop sign. Camera caught them. Nobody did anything. The camera came down the following spring when a snowplow took out the pole, driven by a fellow named Doug who didn't see the post. Sometimes the cleanest resolution to a bureaucratic problem is a poor snowplow driver named Doug.

Jonathan Blair from Alaska and Sam Schimmel from eastern Kentucky are on the show together, talking about a PBS series called American Creed: Citizen Power. Two places that look nothing alike on a map and feel almost identical if you spend time in them. I haven't been to Alaska, but I've been to eastern Kentucky, and I'll tell you that the particular feeling of a place that's been told it doesn't quite matter looks about the same regardless of what the mountains are made of. These two men come from opposite ends of the country and keep arriving at the same conclusions about what keeps a place together, which is either a coincidence or an argument.

Dee Davis from the Center for Rural Strategies sits down with Mistie Johnson of Ignite Ministry in Neon, Kentucky. Neon is a town in Letcher County with about the population of a good church supper. When Davis and Johnson talk about faith and rural life, they're not talking theology. They're talking about the church basement that becomes the food pantry, the pastor who also drives the school bus, the building still keeping its lights on when everything else has closed. Faith in a place like Neon is structural. You can see it from the road.

Nhatt Nichols takes us out to the Olympic Peninsula, where a tribe is working to expand protections at a bird sanctuary. This one gets filed under "environmental" and then passed over, which is a shame, because it's really a story about who gets to decide what's worth protecting and for how long. The birds don't know where the jurisdictional boundaries are. The people who've watched those birds across generations don't much concern themselves with boundaries either.

Ren Yates, who runs Hand in Hand Books down in southwest Colorado, closes out with a recommendation: "This Haunted Land" by Betsy Gaines Quammen. I haven't read it. But any nonfiction book with "haunted" in the title is usually earning that word rather than borrowing it. I'll take Ren's word.

Blackwater Railroad, out of Seward, Alaska, closes the show with what the notes call a "rocking good performance." I like a band that names itself after a train. Trains and rivers, those are the two things you can name a band after and I'll give you a fair listen before the first note.

The whole hour holds together the way a good potluck does. Nobody planned the menu. The dessert table got crowded, the salad end went sparse, and the conversation was better than the food. That's the whole point of the exercise.

Whether one weekly hour can fill the hole that those cuts left is a question for later. What I can say is that Yonder Radio sounds like it's talking to you, not past you. Not broadcast in the old cold way where the voice comes from somewhere up there and lands down here. This is someone sitting nearby, thinking out loud, figuring it's worth your time.

Aunt Vi would say that's rare enough to be worth noticing.

She's been right about most things since the Carter administration, to hear her tell it. I see no reason to argue with her on this one.

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